Arthur Ashe

by Raymond Arsenault

  Over the next decade and a half, Ashe would devote considerable time and energy trying to remedy this problem, either by sponsoring and counseling young black prospects at the college or Junior level, or by developing youth tennis programs in inner-city black neighborhoods. But during the heady winter of 1975–76, when he finally reached the pinnacle of being ranked number one in the world, his primary concern was maintaining the quality of his own game. In early 1976, Tennis and World Tennis magazines, the French sports monthly L’Équipe, and the USTA all placed him at the top of the tennis rankings, and the Martini and Rossi corporation named him Player of the Year, an award that came with a $7,500 check and a ceremonial gold-plated racket.34

  This was a remarkable situation for a thirty-two-year-old veteran with a bum left heel. In the Open era, only Ashe and Laver had achieved a number one ranking after the age of thirty, and even the seemingly ageless Aussie star had eventually slipped in the rankings. Ashe knew he was living on borrowed time, and despite his recent accolades, few observers expected him to sustain the level of play that had brought him nine tournament titles and a Wimbledon crown in 1975. But in the early weeks of the 1976 winter circuit he seemed almost unbeatable. Playing consistently good tennis, he compiled a 12-match winning streak and won the first two tournaments of the year. He then flew to Denver for a special exhibition match with Tony Roche and came away with a straight-set victory and $15,000. Only on January 29 did he finally come down to earth, suffering an upset loss to Tom Gorman at the indoor pro championships in Philadelphia. A week later, however, he was soaring again with a victory at Richmond, his third tournament win in less than thirty days.35

  From Richmond, Ashe traveled to Lagos, Nigeria, to play in that fifteen-year-old nation’s first professional tennis tournament. But just before the tournament was scheduled to start, the Nigerian capital plunged into chaos when an attempted coup d’état against the government of General Murtala Mohammed left the general dead and the nation wondering who was in charge. Ashe and his racket-bearing friends spent the next three days “holed up in the U.S. Embassy compound waiting for events to sort themselves out.” By the third day, the players were getting antsy and wondering when their ordeal would be over. When they asked to leave the country, Nigerian officials informed them they would not be paid unless they honored their commitment to play in the tournament. The players then pressed the officials to start the tournament, and by the next morning, with the antigovernment forces in retreat, the situation seemed calm enough to allow play to begin.

  After the tournament proceeded through three rounds without incident, Ashe found himself facing former UCLA star Jeff Borowiak in a semifinal match that drew a small crowd. Otherwise the situation appeared normal until the third game of the second set. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, chaos enveloped the stadium. As Ashe later described the scene, “I was in the middle of my service motion, up one set over Jeff Borowiak and tied 1-all in the second, when a group of soldiers brandishing machine guns burst into the tennis stadium. ‘What the hell is going on here?’ shouted the soldier in charge. ‘What are you doing? You’re playing games while we’re mourning the death of our president.’ They were enraged.”

  At this point, much of the crowd “panicked and began to flee,” leaving Ashe, Borowiak, the referees, and the ball boys to deal with the soldiers. “One of the soldiers stuck his machine gun in my back and shoved me off the court,” Ashe recalled. “I could feel the cold steel in my back through my wet shirt and there was a sinking feeling in my stomach. I waited for the weapon to go off as I scrambled from the court. Once I was off and it seemed clear I had no intention of returning, the soldier let me go and directed his attention toward some of his countrymen. Four minutes later, we climbed into a government car to go back to the Embassy residence, but right in the middle of the road was the soldier who had shouted at me. He was mercilessly beating a Nigerian who had been trying to get away on a motorcycle. Jeff and I decided to pass up the car and head the other way on foot. One hundred yards away, a large official limousine stopped in front of us. It was the Hungarian ambassador, who had been a spectator. He recognized us and offered us rides back to the U.S. Embassy.” A few hours later, State Department officials and a squad of U.S. Marines escorted nine players to the airport and put them on a plane to Rome, the next stop on the WCT tour.

  In Italy, after Ashe and the other evacuees regaled the international press with tales of their brush with revolution, the touring pros managed to play several days of tennis without armed interruption. Once again Ashe won the tournament, defeating Lutz in the championship match. Amazingly, it was only six weeks into the year, and Ashe had already won four tournaments, nearly half the number he had won in all of 1975. “Arthur Ashe,” The New York Times reported, “is on a rampage.”36

  The streak would continue for another full month, with Ashe eventually winning thirty-two of thirty-three matches. From Rome he went on to Rotterdam, where he won his fifth tournament of the year. After beating Laver in a tough semifinal match—his third victory over the great Australian in twenty-five tries—he needed only fifty-nine minutes to dispatch Lutz in the final.

  A week later, Ashe led the American squad to a surprisingly easy victory over Australia in the seventh annual Aetna World Cup competition, held in Hartford. The United States had won the best-of-seven series only once before, in 1971, but the 1976 contest was a mismatch from the outset. With Laver absent due to a family medical crisis and with Connors added to the American team for the first time, the Aussies managed only one victory in seven matches. Ashe won both of his singles matches, beating Newcombe for only the second time in six years and outlasting Roche in a tough three-set contest. He then partnered with Ralston to defeat Phil Dent and John Alexander, one of the world’s most formidable doubles teams.

  Winning the World Cup with Connors on the team was doubly sweet for Ashe in light of his earlier criticism of the left-hander’s lone-wolf ways; and Connors himself was all smiles after the victory. “Team competition has always been difficult for me,” he conceded. “I’ve always been a loner, a rebel. But I’m all finished with the feuding now. The more I play for a team, the more I like it. I hope they invite me back next year.” This was welcome news to Ashe, who went out of his way to praise his new teammate. “I never really knew Jimmy until we played together at Hartford last weekend,” he told reporters. “We had dinner together. We talked in the locker room. We made a date to play golf. . . . I found that Jimmy is a lot like me; he is independent and has a lot of pride.” When asked about a possible challenge match against his new friend, he insisted he had “no objection so long as it does not interfere with the regular tournament schedule,” and “Bill Riordan is [not] involved.”37

  Ashe and Connors had not played since the 1975 Wimbledon final, but pressure for a rematch had been building for months, especially since the beginning of Ashe’s winning streak. With his street-fighter style, Connors was the most exciting figure in tennis, and despite Ashe’s number one ranking, the young star was still widely regarded as the best player in the game. Praise for Ashe was tempered by the realization he had dominated only one section of WCT’s split-tour format. With up to three concurrent tournaments a week, WCT events had experienced a noticeable dilution of talent. In any given tournament, the competition typically included only one third to one half of the tour’s best players. While Ashe was facing Laver and Lutz in Rotterdam, for example, Tanner and Vilas were playing in another WCT tournament in St. Louis. In many instances, WCT tournaments also had to compete with Davis Cup and special exhibition challenge matches, all of which further diffused the talent pool.38

  The proliferation of tournaments and so-called celebrity matches reflected the ongoing commercialization of Open tennis. The age of big-money tennis had finally arrived, and players and sponsors alike were nervously adjusting to new realties and expectations. New opportunities had inevitably brought new problems, and many tennis insiders, including Ashe, were concerned that
monetary considerations had widened the gap between an elite group of stars and the majority of touring professionals. Ashe himself was not above taking advantage of the new system and was currently participating along with seven other top players in the $320,000 Avis Challenge Cup competition held in Kona, Hawaii. But as a leader of the ATP, he worried about the long-term impact of celebrity tennis on the overall tour.39

  The celebrity problem came to the forefront in late February when two untelevised WCT events were overshadowed by a glitzy, nationally televised celebrity challenge between Connors and Manolo Orantes, the two singles finalists from the 1975 U.S. Open. While the WCT participants drew modest crowds and competed for a top prize of $17,000, Connors and Orantes shared $400,000 of television revenue and competed for a $250,000 winner-take-all purse. After 21 games and fewer than ninety minutes on the court, Connors walked away with the biggest paycheck in tennis history, which, according to one astonished reporter, amounted to more than $2,700 per minute.40

  Ashe, as a member of the elite “Millionaire’s Club” in career earnings, was not in the best position to complain about Connors’s windfall. But in the spirit of fairness, he felt compelled to condemn anything that threatened the livelihood of his fellow ATP members. Lucrative challenge matches were all right to a point, but not when they systematically diverted attention and funding from the tour. “I confess I wear two hats,” he acknowledged, “the first being that of Arthur Ashe the player, who loves the thought of being paid to play, at the rate of $250,000 for a few hours’ work. The second hat, however, is that of Arthur Ashe the president of the Association of Tennis Professionals, who knows that such matches can kill the incentive for top professionals to play in the long and exhausting tournaments that made them what they are in the first place.”41

  A week later, Riordan expressed a decidedly different view, criticizing Ashe for being naive and hypocritical on matters of money. “We have tried to infuse big-money matches into tennis. The sport is, after all, entertainment, and if it isn’t we are all in trouble,” he pointed out. “We wanted, and still want, to make the sport accessible to all those nonpurists out there who flip on their TV sets for a look. In the process we try to land big paydays for tennis stars. I’m old-fashioned enough to believe that a sport isn’t truly big time unless its athletes realize big money.” He went on to attack “the Tennis Establishment,” and by implication Ashe, for trying “to keep the sport in a wax museum.” Traditionally, tennis had been an “old school tie and only club members allowed. Not until the dust was kicked off the sport did the public realize what a big, handsome stud it was and how much fun you could have playing it or watching it. Tennis, despite lead weights on its back, is now big money. It will grow even bigger provided the striped-tie Neanderthals keep their distance.”42

  Riordan’s words stung, but Ashe must have taken some satisfaction from the irony of being lumped with the “Neanderthals” of tennis. A black touring pro, once the ultimate outsider, had somehow become a stodgy insider worthy of attack by a roguish insurgent. Ashe and just about everyone else associated with professional tennis knew Riordan’s characterization was at best a half-truth. Yet Ashe had to admit the men’s tour had been especially good to him as of late.

  Ashe’s hot streak on the court finally came to an end in early May at the WCT Masters, where he lost to Harold Solomon in the first round. A week later, he lost to Brian Gottfried in the quarterfinals of the Las Vegas Tennis Classic. Even though he and Pasarell managed to win the Las Vegas doubles title, it was clear he was slipping back into the pack in singles play. Though disappointed, he couldn’t feel too sorry for himself, since win or lose he was now earning most of his income from the sale of Head rackets, especially the increasing popular “Arthur Ashe Competition 2” model.43

  Of course, he still preferred to make as much money as possible on the court, and during the spring of 1976 his best chance to do so came in late May when he traveled to Kona, Hawaii, for the late rounds of the Avis Challenge Cup. After defeating Rosewall in the semifinals, his earnings in the round-robin competition reached $80,000, by far the largest paycheck of his career, and he stood to earn $100,000 more if he could defeat Nastase in the final. In light of their earlier confrontation in Stockholm, the Ashe-Nastase matchup drew considerable attention and one of the largest television audiences in tennis history.

  A week earlier, Nastase had renewed his bad boy image during a WTT match between the Hawaii Leis and the San Diego Friars. Whenever the Friars’ female star Terry Holladay served, Nastase rang a cowbell, inciting the Leis’ fans and angering her male teammates Laver and Ross Case. Before the contest was over, Case and Nastase engaged in a brief shoving match and had to be separated.44

  During the big match against Ashe, Nastase picked up where he left off, entertaining the crowd with outrageous “clowning” and needling his opponent with “non-stop talking.” At several points, he harangued Ashe, and near the end of the second set, he called him a “bloody nigger.” Ashe later claimed he couldn’t hear anything coming from beyond the other baseline, but a courtside microphone picked up Nastase’s voice, allowing hundreds of thousands of NBC television viewers to hear it all too clearly.

  After the match—which Nastase won in five sets—Ashe tried to downplay the incident. “I didn’t hear anything he said,” he insisted. “But even if he said it, I don’t think he’s a racist.” Graciously giving Nastase the benefit of the doubt, he let the matter drop. In the end, there was no disciplinary action, and Nastase walked away with the $100,000 prize money. Under the championship match’s winner-take-all format, Ashe received only a consolation prize—a black coral ring reportedly worth $400. Considering the nature of Nastase’s transgression, the symbolism was perfect.45

  Ashe did not dwell on the unfortunate incident in Hawaii, which he chalked up to Nastase’s personal demons. Yet he later saw it as a bad omen that ushered in a season of disappointment and discontent. On the court, his performance dropped off sharply during the summer of 1976. At the French Open in early June, he was seeded third but struggled from the outset, eventually losing in the round of 16 to a young unseeded Hungarian, Balázs Taróczy, who had first met Ashe as a nine-year-old ball boy in Budapest. A week later at Nottingham, he was upset in the first round by Roger Taylor, and at Wimbledon, where he was the defending champion and the number one seed, he lost to Vitas Gerulaitis in the fourth round. Ashe, who had never lost to Gerulaitis in four matches, managed to win the first two sets. But his long-haired, twenty-two-year-old opponent wore him out in the final three. “I was just dead,” a weary and disappointed Ashe commented after the match. Fortunately, before the tournament was over he took some comfort from the news that Connors also suffered an upset, at the hands of Tanner in the quarterfinals—and that Nastase lost to Borg in the men’s final.

  For Ashe, the 1976 Wimbledon was memorable mostly for a personal drama outside the lines. When he arrived at the All England Club on the first day, Lois Wise, a twenty-two-year-old former Miss Hawaii, was on his arm. As Ashe explained to curious reporters, they had met several years earlier in Honolulu during a reception sponsored by her employer Aloha Airlines and had dated off and on ever since. But after she sat in the friends box at Centre Court wearing a bright red and white carnation in her hair, the British press had a field day speculating about her relationship with the Wimbledon champion. Described by one reporter as Ashe’s “now-constant beauty queen companion,” she politely dismissed any suggestion that marriage was in the offing. “Arthur and I are just very good friends,” she insisted. “I don’t know why people always ask about marriage.”

  At it turned out, Lois was not the only woman to complicate his stay at the 1976 Wimbledon. The movement to equalize prize money for men and women that had begun in earnest five years earlier with the creation of the Virginia Slims circuit was approaching a crisis point, and the WTA was threatening to boycott future Wimbledons unless equal prize money was guaranteed. As president of the ATP, Ashe felt com
pelled to make a public statement on the proposed boycott. After warning the WTA that “Wimbledon isn’t the sort of event to which you issue demands,” he countered the claim that equalization was justified: “Equal prize money at Wimbledon is basically two questions for me. The first is the quality and the depth of the field. The other is the number of drawing cards the women have. I think on both counts that they would do better not to compare themselves with the men but to look at the women’s situation as it really is. They have been piggybacking on us for a long time.” These strong words would come back to haunt him in later years; indeed, within a year he would reverse his position, much to the delight of Billie Jean King and other committed feminists. But in 1976 he was in solid agreement with his ATP colleagues, very few of whom had much sympathy for the equalization cause.46

  The WTA’s negative reaction to his comments troubled him, and he hoped that eventually all concerned could agree on a reasonable compromise. But he had more immediate problems to attend to as the summer of 1976 progressed. In a series of post-Wimbledon tournaments, he continued to struggle, losing to unseeded opponents on several occasions. He had not reached the quarterfinals of a single tournament since May, and the situation showed no signs of improvement in early August, when he traveled to North Conway, New Hampshire, to play on red clay in the Volvo International tournament. At the Volvo, after losing to Zeljko Franulovic in straight sets in the second round of the singles competition, he teamed with Connors in the doubles. The press welcomed this surprise partnership as proof that Ashe and Connors had “mended” their feud, noting the two men had actually double-dated earlier in the week. But even the dream pairing ended in defeat as the heavily favored 1975 Wimbledon finalists were upset in the third round by two young, unseeded Chilean players.47